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Books, Music, Movies, Art, Politics, Sex, OtherTue, 03 Mar 2015 18:22:47 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1Sound & Vision #12: Shannon Conleyhttp://therumpus.net/2015/02/sound-vision-12-shannon-conley/
http://therumpus.net/2015/02/sound-vision-12-shannon-conley/#commentsFri, 06 Feb 2015 08:01:54 +0000http://therumpus.net/?p=135212Hedwig and the Angry Inch.]]>Welcome back to Sound & Vision, the Rumpus profile series that spotlights the creative talents of those working behind the scenes in the music industry. So far I’ve talked with folks whose work I’ve admired from afar. But in this special installment, I’ll be interviewing the actor and vocalist Shannon Conley whom I first met a few years ago when I was doing a story for public radio on Lez Zeppelin, the amazingly talented Led Zeppelin “tribute” band that Cluck Klosterman has flat out called “the most powerful all-female band in rock history.” If you’re not already familiar with Lez Zeppelin, check out this video of the band performing “Communication Breakdown”:

Shannon has taken Lez Zeppelin’s music all around the world, receiving kudos from legions of fans including Jimmy Page himself. She has also has also earned praise for a variety of roles on screen and stage, and has recently made her Broadway debut as understudy for the role of Yitzhak in Hedwig and the Angry Inch. I was really excited to talk with Shannon about her early influences, the challenges and rewards of musical theater, and what it’s like to perform across gender lines.

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The Rumpus: I understand that your upbringing was fairly unconventional.

Shannon Conley: Both of my parents are from Virginia and they met when my dad was in the Navy, and stationed in Norfolk. My mom was going to school at the time, and after my dad got out they both became teachers. They were both creative and literary—not quite Beatniks or hippies—but I call them the “hip establishment” because they were young and both taught English during the hippie movement. They dug what the kids were doing. They didn’t get wrapped up in the drugs, and the alcohol, and the sex, but they latched onto meditation and spirituality. I joke that we were “Hindu Baptists” because our background was Protestant—that’s kind of the way of the South—but my parents had taken this brave journey together toward Eastern philosophy, going to ashrams and following gurus, and they were doing this in small town, rural Virginia.

Rumpus: How did they specifically find Hinduism?

Conley: My father was always of a spiritual nature, and after becoming disillusioned by the gap between the teachings of Christianity and the ways that the local church perpetuated racial discrimination, he started seeking out other spiritual truths and answers. He eventually got involved with the Light of Yoga Society in Cleveland. He would split every couple of years, go find himself, and then send for the family or he’d come back to us. We moved around a lot, so people thought we were a military family. It was really the spiritual quest my parents were on, and also their unusual relationship dynamic. They actually divorced when I was seven but remarried each other in a Hindu ceremony when I was nine. By this time they were both involved with Sidhha meditation, which was led by Swami Muktananda. When he left his body Gurumayi took over—that’s the guru from Eat, Pray, Love. By this point, we left Cleveland and were living in India. We lived in the same ashram that Elizabeth Gilbert went to in the book.

Rumpus: What brought you back to the States?

Conley: We were in India for a few months, but I got sick a lot. I had dysentery twice. My mother’s mother was from Blackstone, Virginia—population three thousand. Nanny was getting sick, so we decided to move to Blackstone to be with her, and that’s where we stayed from that point on. I tell people I’m from Blackstone.

Listen to Shannon sing a song about growing up between and across cultures (iPad/iPhone users click here):

Rumpus: I imagine moving to Blackstone must have been major culture shock for you.

Conley: It was pretty traumatizing. The high school had about four hundred people, and about one hundred and twenty five were in my graduating class. It was the high school for the entire county. They thought our family was “the cult family”—the kook people, the freaks. And we were also the new family because many of the other families had been there forever. It was an awful place for me to grow up, but later on we became Blackstone’s freaks, and they embraced us. It’s now the quaint little town where my parents live and I’m Facebook friends with most of the people from my school!

Rumpus: Did acting and singing allow you, in a way, to become another person—not a freak?

Conley: Yes.

Rumpus: Which came first for you, acting or music?

Conley: Musical theater. I was singing in the form of acting. My musical tastes come from my mother and my brother. From my mother I got all the jazz and swing and blues. She loved like Nina Simone and Odettta. For my first audition I did “Summertime” and they were like, “Wow! You’re ten, and you know Janis Joplin!” And I was like “Who is Janis Joplin? I’m doing Nina Simone.” [Laughs] Years later I discovered Janis and of course that became a whole new chapter in my musical life. I was about twelve when my brother introduced me to rock ‘n’ roll by way of Led Zeppelin. I was like, “Who is this?” I had a rock band in high school but for me the acting always came first. When I came to New York it was to be an actress, to be on a stage, to play roles, to tell stories.

Conley: I did an internship at Barter Theatre in Abingdon, Virginia when I got out of high school, but they cast out of New York, and I met a bunch of New York actors there. It was an equity house. I learned every aspect of theater, every department—front of house and back of house. I ended up getting really into wardrobe and toured as wardrobe mistress with Barter after my internship ended. Then my New York actor friends invited me to come up and visit. I came and never left. That was it.

Rumpus: What were your early theater jobs like?

Conley: I had all these wardrobe jobs, but at a certain point I realized I had to stop taking them—which was scary because that’s how I was earning my living. But back then you were either on backstage [or] on onstage. You know, it’s ironic because when I think back to the ’80s, it was different in music. There were no clearly defined rock or pop or funk radio stations. Everyone played a little bit of everything. In the ’90s it got more compartmentalized as the stations started to cater to different markets, but during that same period as a dancer, singer, model, or actor, the opposite was true. I’m thinking about Whitney Houston or Madonna, who kicked the doors down so singers could also act. Now, especially in New York, it’s almost expected that you can do more than one thing.

Rumpus: What do you see as some of the differences between acting and performing as a musician?

Conley: I had an original band for a while, but ultimately I stepped away and went back into acting because, as a musician, you have to have such a strong point of view—to say something so particular. Your audience wants to know, and I think this is just human nature, who you are going to be for them. Are you going to be the music I turn to when I get my heart broken? Are you going to be the music I listen to when I’m in the gym? Or when I’m hanging out with my friends? If you try to be one thing you get locked into that identity. If you try to be everything it confuses people and they don’t know what to do with you.

Rumpus: You’re raising a very interesting point here. I remember when I was young, trying to join up with horribly shitty bands that should never have graced a basement, much less a stage. At the same time I was also trying to write all of these original songs that no one wanted to hear. Instead I was expected to nail a set of covers, one minute trying to be Stevie Nicks and the next Chrissie Hynde. But I’m not an actor and so I failed, miserably.

Conley: It isn’t easy.

Rumpus: No. The worst ever was a U2 cover band. So maybe this was circa 1987, and it was that song “With or Without You.” That is such a fucking hard song to sing!

Conley: [Laughs] Yeah. I would love to hear you do that.

Rumpus: Well, I’m very flattered, but I think you may be the only one. From a purely relative standpoint, I think I did a much better job on “Sunday Bloody Sunday” when all I had to do was conjure up a fake Irish accent and stomp on the floor. But to come back around to a serious point, I think it’s much easier to develop a persona than it is to channel personas created by others. It was hard to sing those songs but even harder to feel like I had to somehow “become” Bono.

Conley: Yes, definitely.

Rumpus: Let’s talk about Lez Zeppelin. Lez has often been misidentified as a tribute band or sometimes even as a cover band. But that’s not really what you’re doing. You’re not trying to convince the audience that you’re Robert Plant.

Conley: No. It’s about delivering the energy and spirit of the music.

Rumpus: But you’re not trying to suppress your own energy and spirit.

Conley: Correct. It’s not an impersonation. It’s an influence. Robert Plant was one of my first influences. I learned how to sing by copying him, David Lee Roth, and Steven Tyler—all these male cock rockers.

Rumpus: In your view, are there distinctly male and female ways of singing, and/or of presenting oneself as a kind of gendered persona?

Conley: When I was a girl I grew up listening to and emulating hard rocking male bands. That’s what I enjoyed and what I found I could do with my voice. It never occurred to me that as a woman I might not be allowed to perform in such a “masculine” style or genre. I just figured no one like me had been discovered yet! But then later when I was in an original band called Sugargrass that was trying to get signed in the ’90s, I was constantly being told to soften my vocal style: “Don’t be harder than Gwen Stefani! Melissa Etheridge is already the passionate folk rocker! Alanis Morissette is already the angry girl!”

Alanis had been labeled the angry girl with the song “You Oughta Know,” but she was really the nicest girl, and rather than keep writing angry rocker chick songs, she dropped out. Then Courtney Love came along but also kind of ruined it in a way. She had this great growling wailing voice over crunchy, punchy guitar driven music, but her personality and behavior got the way of the music and art she was creating. I’m not saying Courtney should have been nicer or played the game. But it was just unfortunate that she was the first hard rocking chick to hit the scene, and she ended up setting the progress back for others. Those of us coming up in her wake were deemed untouchable. We were written off as unmarketable and unsellable for a long time.

Rumpus: But even before Courtney Love, Chrissie Hynde had that badass thing going. Her voice was certainly more melodic than Courtney’s, but I’m thinking about that attitude, and some of the early Pretenders songs like “Up the Neck” and “Tattooed Love Boys.” The subject matter was not what you expected to hear, especially coming out of a woman’s mouth.

Conley: Oh yeah, Chrissie Hynde was badass, but I guess I’ve been speaking more in terms of male-oriented vocal styles and musical genres as opposed to masculine/feminine points of view in the lyric. Chrissie was a talk-singer in my mind, and I was all about the howl and wail of full-throated singing! There were no girls doing what I was listening to, singing the way I was singing at the time; Led Zeppelin, Judas Priest, Megadeth, Metallica, Guns N’ Roses, Nine Inch Nails, and all the grunge bands of course, but not one radio station really distributed hard rocking female belters. So is it the genre, style, or the emotional content of the lyric that makes it masculine or feminine?

Rumpus: I think it’s a very complicated alchemy. Look, when you’re up there on stage performing with Lez Zeppelin, everyone can see that you, Steph, Megan, and Leesa are all unambiguously women. Beyond the fact that you can play the hell out of the music, what’s powerful and subversive is how you appropriate the “cock rock” swagger. But with Hedwig, I’m wondering if it’s different, and I suspect that it is. I’m willing to bet there are many people in the audience who see you or Lena Hall as Yitzhak in Hedwig and don’t know they’re watching a woman—in fact, the only woman on that stage.

Conley: In the Playbill there are no pictures either, and that was intentional. When Hedwig had its first off-Broadway run around ’98 this was before marriage equality, before trans awareness, before people really talked about gender and sexuality the way they do now. It made marketing difficult. Even though Hedwig now has a huge cult status, it’s still relatively unknown in the mainstream—that’s one of the reasons Neil Patrick Harris did such a service to the show in the current production. By being such a famous star, it’s helped to put Hedwig on the map.

Rumpus: Does it matter that the role of Hedwig was played only once by a woman—Ally Sheedy—and the role has since been cast exclusively with men, in its current run with Neil Patrick Harris, Andrew Rannells, Michael C. Hall, and soon John Cameron Mitchell?

Conley: Historically that’s been the case. But gender is absolutely a state of mind. People are finally starting to understand that the outside doesn’t have to fit the inside.

Rumpus: In a successful theatrical situation I believe the audience has to forget that they’re in a theater, that they are watching actors, that this world they see on the stage isn’t real. Perhaps it’s dependent on the actor’s ability to sustain the entire illusion, not just the illusion of gender?

Conley: Yes, you have to be all in. You have to do it with your gut, organically, in the moment. The technical aspect is the discipline. It’s important. But you also have to have the flame to propel the rocket.

Rumpus: Where do you find that? I remember when I was on that leg of your tour with Lez Zeppelin and there was one night in Detroit when you were so sick and I remember thinking, How will she make ever make it onto the stage much less make it through the set? But somehow you managed to clear everything away to be present for that show, and you nailed it.

Conley: I was present, but in a way it’s not me. With Yitzhak, it’s the same thing. I leave myself in the wings. Another aspect of me who harbors these other characters takes over when I’m performing. It’s a ride I get to take. I don’t get be that person in my real life, but in a way I do when I’m on stage. Maybe it’s the energy I get from and exchange with the audience. When I was younger, my dad always used to say, “You’re a thousand-watt bulb in a sixty-watt socket.” I still am, but now I get to make a living at it.

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]]>http://therumpus.net/2015/02/sound-vision-12-shannon-conley/feed/1The Rumpus Interview with Tomi Ungererhttp://therumpus.net/2015/01/the-rumpus-interview-with-tomi-ungerer/
http://therumpus.net/2015/01/the-rumpus-interview-with-tomi-ungerer/#commentsWed, 21 Jan 2015 08:01:28 +0000http://therumpus.net/?p=134623Three robbers “steal” a young orphan who opens their hearts, eventually leading them to share their wealth with other lost, unhappy, and abandoned children. A bat who is disenchanted with his appearance attempts to paint himself in vivid colors and fly around in the daytime only to realize he belongs to the night. A lonely retired tax collector finds unexpected companionship with a curious beast who has stolen fruit from his beloved pear tree. Reading Tomi Ungerer’s stories sustained me as a child, made me feel—as all art should—a little less alone. It was not until many years later that I rediscovered these treasures via an animated version of The Beast of Monsieur Racine, which appeared on a DVD collection of children’s classics that I bought for my sons.

The man behind these emotionally complex stories of who we are and where we fit in was born in Strasboug, France in 1931, and grew up under Nazi occupation in Alsace, on the French-German border. Deeply influenced by the work of Saul Steinberg, Tomi Ungerer came to New York in 1956 with $60 in his pocket and a trunk full of drawings. In the golden age of magazines, he was an overnight success, landing illustration work for such publications as the New York Times, Esquire, Life, Harper’s Bazaar, and the Village Voice. In 1957, the visionary and subversive Harper & Row editor Ursula Nordstrom published Ungerer’s first children’s book, The Mellops Go Flying, to critical acclaim. The Mellops became a popular series, and many other children’s titles followed, among them: Crictor (1958), Adelaide (1959), Emil (1960), Rufus (1961), The Three Robbers (1961), and Moon Man (1967).

During this period Ungerer also wrote satirical books for adults, as well as publishing political posters protesting segregation and the Vietnam War. The self-publication of Fornicon (1969), a book of erotic drawings depicting people engaged in sexual activities with pleasure machines, upended his career in America. Unable to accept that a children’s book author could also produce provocative adult-themed work, Ungerer was invited to the annual convention of the American Library Association, and then attacked by the librarians during a Q & A session. He was subsequently blacklisted by libraries across the country. Disillusioned with the US, Ungerer and his wife decamped for Nova Scotia, eventually settling permanently in rural Ireland, where they’ve lived since the mid-seventies.

The Rumpus: First of all, welcome back to New York, and thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me! The Drawing Center’s “All in One” is both a career retrospective and a reintroduction of your work to American audiences. Can you tell me how this exhibition came about?

Ungerer: About five or so years ago attention to my work in America was renewed when Michael Kimmelman wrote an article about me in the New York Times after visiting with me in Strasbourg. It was Phaidon who decided to publish me again in English, and in terms of children’s books they’ve done a splendid job of catching up. They’ve also published one adult book of mine, one of my autobiographies about my time in Canada. That changed everything.

As for this specific exhibit, my daughter decided to become my representative. She said, “Now that you’re published again in English, let’s try to come back with New York.” We met with the Drawing Center, and it developed from there. Claire Gilman, the Center’s curator, came to Ireland and Strasbourg where a lot of my work is displayed in the museum. She was able to put many styles into The Drawing Center exhibit to give people a clean and basic idea of my work—at least with respect to my drawing and animations.

Rumpus: Let’s go back and retrace your history in New York. When you first came here in 1956, you famously got your start by cold calling art directors, carrying around your portfolio in a paper bag. Tell me about the New York of the ’50s, what life was like for you as you tried to establish your career here.

Ungerer: In those days illustration was all over the place, in all of the magazines. It was just wonderful! I was struck by the kindness and welcome and how easily people would just give appointments. You could just call! Everyone took care of me, and I will always be grateful. I still love New York as much as I ever did. It’s an electric town. One just feels it!

Rumpus: How did you first connect with Ursula Nordstrom at Harper & Row?

Ungerer: Well, I must tell you that the children’s book level was pretty bad. The biggest outfit at the time was Golden Books. I went there and saw the head editor-in-chief. I didn’t even know his name—I just went there. And he received me, and said, “Yes, this is great work but you’re in America, and your style just doesn’t fit here. This is not the kind of thing I can use or publish. There is only one woman who would do this kind of work, who would publish your kind of books, and that’s Ursula Nordstrom.” And then he picked up the telephone and called Ursula Nordstrom and said, “Hey, I’ve got a young Frenchman here whose work you might be really interested in” and he arranged for an appointment for me to see her.

Rumpus: Harper published your first children’s book, The Mellops Go Flying (1957), the year after you arrived in the US. How many children’s books did you publish between the Mellops series and Allumette in 1974?

Ungerer: I would say maybe twenty to twenty-five books. On average I did about three books a year.

Rumpus: You were quite prolific! While you were doing these children’s books, you were also doing illustrations, advertising campaigns, satirical books for adults, and then you also began creating political posters denouncing segregation, the Vietnam War…

Ungerer: Yes. [Laughs]

Rumpus: The political posters seemed not to raise an eyebrow in the children’s literature world, but it was a different story with your erotic drawings, which essentially resulted in you being blacklisted. At what point did you decide to leave the US?

Ungerer: Well, actually my trouble started earlier than the erotica. In 1960 I applied for a visa to visit “Red China.” I would have been for Newsweek one of the first reporters to go, so I went from New York to Paris, and then came a Telex saying if I went to China I would not be allowed back into the United States. It was a witch-hunt in those days, and wanting to go to China made me a Communist. So I gave up on my trip, but when I arrived in New York, I was arrested and kidnapped, just like in the movies. They grabbed me. There were three men in the hall, and one said, “Drop your suitcases quietly!” The guy behind grabbed my suitcases, and then they whisked me off in a car. Then they grilled me, they even opened the soles of my shoes, and after that my telephone was tapped, and my mail was opened. The message was: “Get out of here.” And then Kennedy was elected, and I wasn’t tapped anymore, but it was the beginning of my problems. Even before the erotica, I’d been pegged as a Communist, and that’s when it really started. Then came the erotica.

Rumpus: When you left the US, did you plan for your move to be permanent?

Ungerer: I left in ’71, the year after I met my wife, Yvonne. I just felt that the atmosphere had changed—and I felt it was time to go.

Rumpus: So you moved first to Canada and then to Ireland, where you’ve lived since ’76. Why did you choose Ireland?

Ungerer: Yvonne and I wanted to leave Canada. It was lawless where we lived—even the police station was closed. We decided to have a family, and at the time everyone was talking about Ireland. Yvonne was pregnant when we went to Ireland, and we fell in love. It’s the quality of the people we found there, the right kind of spirited-minded people. That was that. We went back with six suitcases.

Rumpus: You’ve called your most recent children’s book, 2013’s Fog Island, your tribute to Ireland. It tells the story of a brother and sister who live on the Irish coast but are caught in a storm and transported by boat to Fog Island, a mysterious and ominous place from which no one is said to return alive. But the children don’t give in to their fear, and ultimately, they’re rewarded for the openness and curiosity.

Ungerer: Yes, but I believe children should always be scared. In my studio I have a skeleton, and the other day I had a visitor: a woman who came with her little six year old daughter, and she said, “I came because I visited you when I was a child. My mother brought me here, and I was scared of the skeleton, and you told me the skeleton was your momma, and you asked me to shake her hand, and I was terrified to shake the hand of your dead mother.” Then I explained to her that it was a joke and through jokes you overcome fear.

Rumpus: Well, it’s complicated, right, because your children’s books take the readers from despair to humor, from fear to courage? It’s the working through that brings the catharsis.

Ungerer: Yeah. My mother was fearless, you know, and I was brought up that way. Can you imagine a woman: “We’re called in to the Gestapo! We may be arrested immediately and sent to a Concentration camp,” and my mother, taking me with her, is winking at me and saying, “Don’t worry; they’re all idiots!” [Laughs] What an attitude!

Rumpus: As I look back at the characters you’ve created in your children’s books, I see that the heroes are unlikely—they may be outcasts, and they’ve often had to overcome disadvantages of one kind or another to find companionship or realize that they prefer solitude. As you look back at these characters, are there particular ones you identify with the most?

Ungerer: I identity a little bit with all of them. I’m always on the side of the underdog. I identify with my snake, my octopus, all of my rejected animals. You will find me in the heroes of all my children’s books.

Rumpus: Your work is gaining more and more renewed attention in the US. Does this exhibition, here in New York, feel like coming full circle for you?

Ungerer: Yes, it’s very comforting. I just met yesterday with the son of Bill Cole, who was a great cartoon specialist and my editor for The Underground Sketchbook. And in those days I was sharing a house with Philip Roth, and he wrote the preface for The Underground Sketchbook, and the publisher said they wouldn’t publish it because Philip Roth was not famous enough! [Laughs] This is irony, you know! Had he known!

Rumpus: There have been a long series of ironic reversals. I understand that the American Library Association has even screened the 2012 documentary that was made about you at one of their recent conventions.

Ungerer: Yes. I’ve heard that. [Laughs]

Rumpus: You once thought up a brilliant slogan, originally for the New York Lottery, then later adopted by the Village Voice: “Expect the Unexpected.” What can we expect next from Tomi Ungerer?

Ungerer: [Laughs] It’s impossible for Phaidon to catch up on everything! But I wouldn’t mind if some of my other autobiographical books were to come out in English, and maybe some of my aphorisms and plays on words. I’m sure everything will find its time. In terms of new work, for me it’s all about my writing now and my sculpture. There’s a big museum of modern art in Zurich that will show my sculpture and other artwork this fall. I would really love to have a sizeable show of my new work in America, too.

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“Tomi Ungerer: All in One” will run through March 22nd. For more information about the retrospective, click here. For more on Ungerer’s work, click here.

And just announced! Phaidon’s next Ungerer reissue, Snail, Where Are You?, is scheduled for April 15th.

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Feature image courtesy of Tomi Ungerer. Images of Eat, No Parking Please, and Untitled from Fog Island courtesy of The Drawing Room. The “cat” daycare center is a 2011 collaboration between Ungerer and the architectural firm Ayla-Suzan Yöndel for Europe without Borders. Image of Snail, Where Are You? is courtesy of Phaidon.

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]]>http://therumpus.net/2015/01/the-rumpus-interview-with-tomi-ungerer/feed/2Sound & Vision #10: Scott Crawfordhttp://therumpus.net/2014/12/sound-vision-10-scott-crawford/
http://therumpus.net/2014/12/sound-vision-10-scott-crawford/#commentsFri, 12 Dec 2014 08:01:47 +0000http://therumpus.net/?p=133283Salad Days, his punk fanzine Metrozine, Kickstarter, and DIY music culture.]]>Welcome back to Sound & Vision, the Rumpus profile series that spotlights the creative talents of those working behind the scenes in the music industry. When people think of punk, cities like London and New York spring to mind immediately. But in the ’80s punk also thrived in Washington, DC against the backdrop of the Reagan administration and the city’s reputation as the “murder capital” of the nation.

As a very young suburban teen, Scott Crawford fell in love with the punk scene, going to all-ages shows to see bands including Minor Threat, Bad Brains, and Fugazi, and documenting his favorites in his own fanzine called Metrozine. Through the ’90s Crawford went on to start two other zines focused on indie music, and in 2001 he also founded a music magazine called Harp. Harp folded in 2008 amid the economic crisis that swept the publishing industry, but its closure created an opportunity for Crawford to revisit his old love of DC punk as a first-time director of Salad Days: A Decade of Punk in Washington, DC (1980-1990). With long-time friend and collaborator Jim Saah serving as the film’s cinematographer and editor, Crawford interviewed musicians, label owners, activists, photographers, and writers to show how DC’s particular take on punk helped to shape independent music and popular culture in the decade the followed, and how its influence persists in today’s DIY music scene. We had a chance to talk about the film hours before its sold-out premiere at DOC NYC, New York’s Documentary Festival.

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The Rumpus: Tell me how you first got introduced to the DC punk scene.

Scott Crawford: My good friend’s older sister introduced me—I was not even twelve at this point, so all I knew about punk was Billy Idol. Before I got into punk I was really into the new wave stuff like Haircut 100, Adam and the Ants, really horrible stuff. I already had a fascination with stuff that wasn’t on the radio, so it was kind of natural to fall into this punk stuff. But it also helped that I had a huge crush on my friend’s sister. I was just sit in her room, and she would say, “You have to hear this band, Scream, and she would play me Scream’s Still Screaming, and “Teenager in a Box” by Government Issue, and Minor Threat’s Out of Step. I remember it was so loud, and so fast, and hearing people say “fuck” was so great! From there I started hanging out at the two or three really good mom and pop record stores in town, and they were carrying all this stuff and they were great, turning me on to all kinds of crazy shit. My parents would drive me there on weekends and I would just hang out there and they’d play me all the latest 45’s.

Rumpus: Do you remember your first show?

Crawford: I do! It was in a club—actually it was just an old movie theater—and it was a band called Void.

Rumpus: Was it an all-ages show?

Crawford: Yes. Most of them were—I never had a fake ID. Most of the places that hosted these shows weren’t even bars. They were just holes in the wall, church basements or converted theaters, and there was no reason to keep kids out. I was one of the only kids, and I looked way younger than twelve, but there was no problem. As long as I got home before 1 a.m.—my curfew—my parents let me go on a long leash. Some kids get big into GI Joe, or Harry Potter, or sports. But for me it was punk. Once I started doing the fanzine, my parents saw me pursue my passion for the first time.

Rumpus: When you first started documenting what you heard and saw in Metrozine, whom did you imagine as your audience?

Crawford: In the beginning it was really just like a diary for me—and the writing was horrible, just what I was seeing and hearing. I borrowed freely from other zines—Flipside was a big one, also Maximum Rocknroll, and then there were a bunch of other local zines I loved like Truly Needy and Thrillseeker. But I remember thinking, “Oh, God! This only comes out once a year!” I couldn’t get enough so I thought I’d do a zine myself. I had interviews, record and show reviews, and pictures. I would stand outside of the shows and sell copies of Metrozine to other fans.

Rumpus: At what point did you meet up with Jim Saah?

Crawford: Jim was at many of the same shows. He had a zine too and I remember calling him up and asking if I could use some of the photos from his zine and he was so offended because I was like, “Oh, you don’t have to give me prints. I’ll just cut up your pictures!” He was like, “Fucking kid!” But that was just the spirit of it.

Rumpus: The Washington City Paper once did a feature on you and Metrozine—the feature photo for this interview was taken from that piece.

Crawford: Yeah, they did! I have a funny story about that. The photographer came to my door and said, “Hey, I’m here to take a picture of a punk rock kid.” And I was like, “Yeah, that’s me.” He was like, “Can we gel your hair up? Do you have any safety pins?” So I went in the bathroom and combed my hair as perfectly as I could to make it look super-neat just to piss him off.

Rumpus: Which is in its own way punk. But you’re raising an interesting point here because I notice most of the people in the film—the musicians and the audience—don’t look stereotypically “punk.”

Crawford: DC was really unique that way. You had some dudes with mohawks and stuff, but most of them were just college kids. There was a certain intellectual element there. These were the kids of pretty highly educated parents—suburban kids, private school kids.

Rumpus: Did the bands tour much, or were they concentrated mostly in the local scene?

Crawford: Often they’d do like eight or nine local shows, and then implode, and then maybe a year later they’d put out a record. That contributed to a certain mythology—there’s this band and they’re fucking great but you can’t see them anymore because they’ve already broken up and live on only in their recordings.

Rumpus: It’s fascinating how that works, and now amazing bands from decades ago get also get newly discovered through various cult reissue labels and documentaries like Salad Days. Do you think the bands being in constant flux contributed to or detracted from their success?

Crawford: Unless you were in a huge band like Black Flag or something you were not making any money—and even then you were sleeping on floors. Not even the label owners made money. For example. Ian Mackaye had like three part-time jobs while he was running Dischord for the first couple of years. No one was thinking there was going to be this huge payoff financially. It was all about the music. The community just kept growing, and people were invested in keeping it alive.

Rumpus: Throughout the ’80s you were deeply immersed in the DC punk scene as a participant and an archivist, but then you moved on to other zines and magazine projects documenting the indie music scene that followed. Had you maintained an archive of the punk stuff all along, or did you have to reconstruct it from scratch to tell the story we see in Salad Days?

Crawford: I lost a lot of stuff in various moves, but luckily I was still touch with a lot of people from the scene and I knew I would have access to videos, fanzines, and other artifacts. When my magazine Harp folded I came to Jim with the idea of doing the documentary. It took some convincing—he thought maybe it was too ambitious—but there was huge interest.

Rumpus: In addition to interviews with folks who helped to create the DC scene and were at its center—people like Ian MacKaye and Henry Rollins—Salad Days also includes the perspectives of others like George Pelecanos, Fred Armisen, and Thurston Moore. What led to your decision to include those voices?

Crawford: It was important to me to show how far reaching this music really was. In Pelecanos’s case, he’s a DC native so he experienced it first hand. Even though he was a casual observer of what was happening at the time, the music made an impression. It shows up in several of his books as part of the backdrop of the city in the ’80s.

Rumpus:Salad Days was crowdfunded via Kickstarter. When the film reached its goal, the Black Cat in DC hosted a party featuring DC punk legends Dag Nasty (the original line-up), Government Issue, Black Market Baby, and Kingface. Soulside are now planning to reunite for shows this month in conjunction with the DC premiere of the film. That’s really exciting—can you tell me a little more about how these shows came together?

Crawford: When we kicked off the Kickstarter campaign two years ago, we had an amazing lineup of bands get back together for the weekend and the spirit in the room was so amazing. Here we are almost two years later to the day, and I wanted to invite some more bands to come and celebrate. Soulside was always a favorite of mine—and haven’t shared the stage in over 25 years, so I think it’s going to be a pretty special weekend. Moss Icon was always an intense live band and remain so today. Who knows, I may even plug my guitar in and join them onstage for a song or two. Or maybe another band could show up and play. Wink.

Watch Dag Nasty play at the Black Cat in support of Salad Days:

Rumpus: One final question: Your film is called Salad Days after the eponymous song by Minor Threat, which is explicitly anti-nostalgic. You’ve also said in previous interviews that you don’t intend for this film to take a nostalgic tone. What’s wrong with nostalgia?

Crawford: Nothing’s wrong with nostalgia and that’s certainly a fun part about watching this film, or even just listening to the music you grew up with in your car; music that’s made such an impact on you. It feels good and it gives you goose bumps. But I just don’t want people to think I’m somehow saying this was the best that DC had to offer or that the best days are behind us. Jim’s son now plays in a punk band—he’s part of a whole new generation. My kids are still too young to play. I hope they will, but I also worry that they’ll grow up and become Republicans.

***

Salad Days will next be screened at the AFI Silver Theatre in Silver Spring, Maryland December 19th- 22nd. If you’re not in the DC area, you can still see Salad Days at other upcoming screenings, and in the meantime you can enjoy the film’s trailer:

Also, Dischord Records has just released Fugazi’s First Demo. The record includes eleven songs recorded at Inner Ear Studios in 1988, when the band had performed only ten shows. Here’s one of the tracks:

Related Posts:

]]>http://therumpus.net/2014/12/sound-vision-10-scott-crawford/feed/0Sound & Vision #8: David Barneshttp://therumpus.net/2014/10/sound-vision-8-david-barnes/
http://therumpus.net/2014/10/sound-vision-8-david-barnes/#commentsMon, 20 Oct 2014 07:01:28 +0000http://therumpus.net/?p=131704Welcome back to Sound & Vision, the Rumpus profile series that spotlights the creative talents of those working behind the scenes in the music industry. Indie pop, vaudeville funk, glam, and electronica—over the years of Montreal has managed to master each of these genres in pursuit of its own grand creative vision. I’ve always been fascinated not only by the band’s music, but also its incredible album art and elaborate stage shows. These visual feasts are the work of the multimedia artist and performer David Barnes, brother of the band’s frontman Kevin Barnes.

From 1998’s The Gay Parade on, David has been responsible for bringing of Montreal’s distinctive visual aesthetic to life. His innovative album art has gone far behind the sleeve to include collectible cassette covers, posters, and even a board game. In 2008 the album Skeletal Lamping was released in no less than ten different formats, including a conventional CD and vinyl, as well as t-shirts, button sets, wall decals, tote bags, and a paper lantern with embedded download codes. David has also designed videos and animations, costumes, props, and sets for of Montreal’s live performances, and in 2011, he published the book ¿What’s Weird?, a twenty year retrospective of his paintings and sketches. David is currently touring with of Montreal and designing the visuals for the band’s forthcoming spring album. He spoke to me about his life and work, and why—perhaps more than ever—it’s important to create art that brings people together.

***

The Rumpus: Can you tell me a little about your early artistic influences?

David Barnes: Every little kids draws, and then some people just stop drawing. You can see it in adults where at some point someone said to them, “You draw like a twelve-year-old,” and that’s when they stopped drawing. But some people continue, for some reason. And for me that was because whenever my aunt would come over she would always be like, “Oh, it’s time to draw,” and afterwards she would look at it and pay attention to the details, like, “Oh, there’s a mountain goat on top of the mountain!” When you get praise like that when you’re young, you like it and you say, “Oh, okay, I’m going to do more of that!” If eventually the mountain goat on top of the mountain wouldn’t get that response anymore, then maybe I’d say, “Okay, I’m putting an alien at the bottom.” She kept encouraging me to do new things.

Rumpus: When did you first consider pursuing art as a career?

Barnes: When I was little drawing was like playing with toys for me. If I was by myself I would make studios in closets by taking everything out of there and just holing up. But it was really my brother Kevin, when he started taking music more seriously, who turned me onto the idea that making art was something to take seriously.

Rumpus: So from the start, did you two think of making art as a collaborative enterprise?

Barnes: We were so close it was just like logic. In the very beginning it was more like he would just see a painting I made and he’d be like, “Let’s use that one!” but very quickly we started getting more in-depth, more into it. And he was writing songs that were very pictorial, that had a story. Around the time of The Gay Parade—that was the first album where I just drew all these characters. I was about eighteen or nineteen at the time, that time in life where you’re searching for a purpose, and he and I would focus on this one project and make it the most important thing in the universe. It was great!

Rumpus: Over the years, your artwork has always managed to capture the essence of what’s happening musically for of Montreal. When you design a particular album, are you thinking more about the specific themes of that record or the discography from the beginning to the present?

Barnes: It always feels to me like a brand new project. It’s actually funny that we’re talking about this right now because I’m in the very beginning stages of designing artwork for the new album. I’m listening to the demos and trying to see what it looks like. Images pop into my head and I’ll be like, “Hmm. Maybe. No. Maybe it’s this one? Could be. Yes! That’s the one.” Sometimes it’s almost like in Mad Men when [Don’s] in his office and he’s lying on the couch and it looks like he’s just sleeping, but in his mind the final product is formulating. At first it’s all inside your mind and you’re just going with your gut. Then you have to decide what direction is worth pursuing.

Rumpus: Is part of the challenge that you’re not just coming up with a visual representation of the music, but something more like an aesthetic sense?

Barnes: It’s important to put that weight on it. You have to feel like it’s very, very important. You know that nervous feeling you get before you do anything that’s really big, that feeling that you can’t fail. You have to work through that to get to the point where you can make something that feels big, feels like it could last forever, that it could be that important.

Barnes: It’s always meant so much to Kevin and me to have this visual representation of the music, and to have a package that makes it so much more visceral, so much more real. You can play the record and hold this thing, and look at it, and take it in on all of these different sensory levels. When we started it was CDs, and CDs are small—and then things were reduced to thumbnails because people were using digital files, like mp3s, and it felt like artwork wasn’t even going to be a factor anymore. With Skeletal Lamping we really wanted to do something that, even when confined to the CD package, you could hold up and fold out, and that would force you to look at this thing, and it would become bigger that way. So we made it into a sculpture! The big challenge was to make something fit into those small parameters. It was really just an attempt to get back, to imagine what people felt in the 50s or the 70s when they had to search for a record, and when they found it, and listened to it, and held it, it was special. It was something they were going to take care of and treasure.

Rumpus: And share with others?

Barnes: Yes, it is meant to be social. There was a time when you might have been a kid and one of your friends had Prince’s Purple Rain, and maybe your mom wouldn’t let you get that, but you could you go to your friend’s house and listen to it together. Now, with the Internet, you can just put it in your computer and listen to it by yourself, but you have nothing to share with other people. When we made the board game, the idea was that it would be almost impossible to play—you know the rules are so convoluted—the real point was just to be with your friends laughing together as you tried to play. It didn’t really matter if you won or lost. It was about laughing at surreal ideas.

Rumpus: Is this rematerialization of the music also part of an effort to get fans to buy something they might otherwise expect to get for free?

Barnes: Even if you’re a kid who grew up in the digital age, it’s still exciting to see something tangible.

Rumpus: I agree, and I’m thinking now about what you just said about Purple Rain—as soon as you threw out that title, I immediately saw the album cover in my mind’s eye. I’m not sure young kids today have that visual vocabulary—at least not connected to music.

Barnes: Right. That’s sad.

Rumpus: And even now that vinyl is coming back it’s still not returned to being the standard way that people listen to music. Big boxes like Target, Best Buy, and Bed Bath & Beyond are carrying some titles but probably not too many beyond prefabricated pop hits and the obvious reissues…

Rumpus: The person who’s picking up some records with their sheets and towels probably isn’t the same person who’s going to spend hours browsing in an independent record store. For you and Kevin, how much of a factor in designing of Montreal’s albums is the merchandising?

Barnes: The visual is so closely tied to the music for us, and it just brings Kevin and me so much joy to work together—me getting new songs from him and him getting new images from me. And I think if you go in the opposite way—forget about the packaging—you’ll still get some people interested, but most people who buy our records are buying vinyl now. It’s not just a delivery mechanism or merchandising—it’s something they can have. The immediacy of a digital stream or download is nice, but it’s not the same as having something physical.

Rumpus: It seems very important to you that the art you make is tangible, has meaning. Are you always thinking about new ways to bring of Montreal’s music to life?

Barnes: Yes. My mom is kind of a hoarder of stuff—like knockoffs of little ceramic sculptures, like maybe an 18th century kid skipping—and I’m finding them in thrift stores and painting over them and changing them completely so they’re the characters from the album artwork. And I’m thinking about selling them at shows at the merch table as a true one-of-a-kind souvenir.

Rumpus: Let’s talk more about the band’s live show. When you’re planning a tour how do you approach the visuals and the kinds of skits, etc. that you perform?

Barnes: First we toss out a lot of ideas and then you figure out what’s possible. Like we might say “How about tigers on stage!” and then we realize, “Oh, that may not work”—but maybe we can animate that. We try to do a new show every four shows, and if a new album comes out that’s when we scrap everything and start from scratch with costumes, animations, etc. A tour may go for like three months, and then one of my favorite things is a little satellite that comes after that where we have all of this stuff and come up with new ways of using it. It’s more like what I do with my drawings, where I might say, “Oh, I have this mirror suit and I have this pig mask and they’re used for different things. I’m going to put the pig head on the mirror. Then he’s going to fall in love with the Princess Leia character from this scene…”

Rumpus: How did you come up with the title for your book ¿What’s Weird? and what was it like to choose from among this vast repertoire of characters and images?

Barnes: When I was young, in middle school, people would say, “You’re weird!” I hated it so much. Then they’d say something like, “Ooh! A squid! That’s weird!” It’s not weird. It’s just a fact. I also know a little Spanish—just enough to know the upside down question mark captures that idea. For the images, I went on instinct. It was like I’ll have to make a decision… like a worm with a sloth face, that’s stupid. But a bear with a goat head, no, that’s good! I’ll keep that one!

Rumpus: You’ve also extended that idea to defamiliarize iconic food packaging, grocery ads, and to chronicle the misadventures of a “bad baby.” Can you tell me more about that?

Barnes: Bad baby is a “Martha Pullan original”—that’s what my mom calls it. It’s a doll made by this sewing guru that my mom gave to my brother’s daughter as a gift. But one day when my niece was little she walked into her bedroom and she saw the doll move and it freaked her out so much that the next morning she and Kevin were at my door with the doll in a paper bag and she asked me if it could live at my house instead. Since then it’s become a sort of good luck charm that comes on every tour with us and gets up to no good.

Rumpus: Do you have a dream project that you haven’t been able to pursue yet?

Barnes: Yes, I have this graphic novel idea that’s been in my brain so long, in so many different forms. It’s about a pregnant male football player. Half of it is his story and the other half is about the baby growing inside his womb in this fantastic world, basically moving toward birth. The idea is that the fetus isn’t just sitting there growing. Inside their minds are already forming—they say babies come out with a certain disposition—so this is what’s playing out in his head as he’s growing. They get born and forget everything, but when the guy in the gas station turns his back and the kid grabs a candy bar, it’s probably because in the womb he was already practicing by stealing the treasure from the dragon!

Rumpus: And you’re actually expecting a baby in real life, right?

Barnes: Yes!

***

This interview has been edited and condensed. If you’d like to recommend someone for “Sound & Vision,” drop Allyson a line here.

***

All photographs courtesy of David Barnes/Polyvinyl.

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]]>http://therumpus.net/2014/10/sound-vision-8-david-barnes/feed/1Sound & Vision #6: Nate Duvalhttp://therumpus.net/2014/09/sound-vision-6-nate-duval/
http://therumpus.net/2014/09/sound-vision-6-nate-duval/#commentsWed, 03 Sep 2014 19:00:21 +0000http://therumpus.net/?p=130155Welcome back to Sound & Vision, the Rumpus profile series that spotlights the creative talents of those working behind the scenes in the music industry. This time up I’m talking with Nate Duval, who has designed and illustrated posters and album covers for musicians including Wilco, Spoon, Broken Social Scene, Andrew Bird, and M. Ward. Duval’s work is bold and vibrant, his graphics often depicting novel combinations of humans, plants, and animals. When we met, Duval explained how he got into design, what it was like to break into the field, and where he sees it trending next. He also has a lot to say about the number eight.

***

The Rumpus: I understand that your background is in advertising and design.

Nate Duval: Yes, in high school I was good at most subjects, but I knew when it was time for college that I wanted to pursue my interest in visual arts. I didn’t want to miss out on other experiences, so instead of art school I went to Syracuse University in the Visual and Performing Arts school. The program was “real world” based. They gave you a product and you had to conceptualize a print ad campaign, get feedback on your designs, and at the end of the semester you would actually produce the ad.

Rumpus: Did you know right away that you would apply your design skills to the music world?

Duval: I played trumpet and guitar in school, and I was always into music, but I didn’t know at the time that my design training would lead me to a music-related career. When it was time for me to graduate I started looking at jobs at ad agencies, but something wasn’t connecting for me. It just seemed less creative in real life than the picture I painted when I was in college. So I ended up working at a place called Blue Q in Pittsfield, Massachusetts as the lone in-house designer. They make products and gift merchandise, and I got a real crash course in the commercial arts—everything from photographing products to putting art into templates, working with manufacturers, talking with artists, and making the catalogue. I spent a year there really learning how to make and sell things. That experience inspired me and opened my eyes to new ways to be creative in my down time.

Rumpus: How did you get into gig poster design?

Duval: In the beginning my interest in concert posters was very fanboyish. I was like, “Wow! The Rapture are coming to town. It would be so cool to work with them!” It was the MySpace era, and a lot of bands ran their own pages. Sometimes you could get them on the other side of a MySpace message! So I started making concert posters for local shows, like at the Iron Horse in Northampton. I met more people and more bands there. I started networking and building a portfolio.

Rumpus: Do you remember your first successful pitch?

Duval: I think it was for a band called Apollo Sunshine. They were three guys who were, at the time, living near me in Amherst, Massachusetts, and I really liked one of their songs called “Today Is the Day.” They played around town a lot, and I thought they were so cool, so one day I reached out, and from that point on I really got the itch. There’s a website called Gigposters.com where they host a lot of discussions about making posters. It was really important to me to find other people out there who were doing what I wanted to do. There’s also an event called Flatstock held at South by Southwest and other festivals where I learned a lot about other artists’ processes. Even though we’re in direct competition with each other, we openly share ideas and information.

Rumpus: What’s one of the most common misconceptions people have about how to break into concert poster design?

Duval: People often ask me if the bands know I’m making posters for them. You can’t just make things for bands and sell them because then you’re stealing that band’s identity.

Rumpus: So you’re saying that selling hand-made posters is different than carving “Kiss” or “The Doors” into your desk at school?

Duval: [Laughs.] Yes! Making unauthorized merchandise for a band is no different that taking the Nike logo and putting it on a T-shirt and selling it. Plus “bootlegger” isn’t a good look for your portfolio. If you’re just starting out you’re much better off making posters for smaller bands who are your friends. Start small, and show people what you can do.

Rumpus: When you first started out, did you have a signature style or was it more you trying to capture the vibe of a band?

Duval: It was a mix. My goal was and still is not to sell me, but to make something for whomever I’m working with. Some bands are very hands-on, and some aren’t. It used to be I’d work with the promoters or managers of smaller bands and turn posters around pretty quickly, but these days I make all kinds of merchandise, not just posters, but also album covers and T-shirts and stuff, and mostly for larger touring bands.

Rumpus: How do the bands find you?

Duval: Some illustrators have one style, but I’ve done a lot of work for different bands, from indie and jam artists to country musicians. Sometimes the band reaches out to me, and I also work with a lot of artist management groups. We talk about generally what they’re looking for and sometimes I’ll pitch three or four ideas in written form to help get things going.

Rumpus: When you’re thinking up ideas for a concert poster, are you focused on the event specifically, or something more lasting? I feel like it used to be that gig posters announced an event, and when the event was over, the poster disappeared. But now they seem a lot less ephemeral.

Duval: Yes, I think they are becoming less ephemeral and for the same reasons that vinyl is coming back. You can fill your computer with MP3s, but it’s not as appealing as collecting physical objects. Gig posters are silkscreened, and feel a certain way when you touch them, and they smell like ink. They’re also tangible and limited. In fact, they’re signed and numbered, which makes them desirable as collectibles. As music has become streamlined and digital, bands and fans have picked up the specialness of having something real and lasting. A poster is the new T-shirt at the merch booth: You can get a mass produced object, or you can take home a special hand-made thing that speaks to you about an artist you like, which was made by another artist you may like, commemorating an event you liked.

Rumpus: And of course there is the visual draw of a poster that you don’t often get with concert T-shirts. I remember walking into record stores and choosing to buy albums just because I loved the artwork.

Duval: Yes—I’ve been there too. You think, “If this sounds like it looks, it’s going to be something I’m into.” I think about that lot when I design.

Rumpus: Can you describe your design process? Do you prefer to work “in analog” or on a computer?

Duval: It varies from project to project, but when I begin a design, I don’t use a tablet. Usually it’s a ballpoint pen on computer paper. People often tell me they like my imperfect line, and I think that has a lot to do with the fact that my work isn’t a vector-based, computer-generated line. It’s a human line.

Rumpus: And how do those initial drawing become refined?

Duval: You know, I first learned to design for silkscreen, and I think it has made me a better artist because it limits certain aspects, such as the colors you use, and that style works well across media. So now, even though I complete my work in Photoshop, I still act as if I’m making a silkscreen. Each color is a layer, and I’m sort of building each design with a set of screens. Say it’s a three-color project with black, yellow, and red. I’ll do all of my black images as one layer; then I’ll do the same with the other colors.

Rumpus: As your career has evolved you’ve moved from designing concert posters and music packaging to doing other kinds of merchandise and product design, and it’s perhaps ironic that you’re now also back in the ad world.

Duval: The posters I was making for young, hip, indie bands, were in essence turning into giant, silkscreened business cards for me and my business as they spread their way around the Internet with my name and credit attached to them. When people saw them, businesses especially, they wanted that youthful, playful vibe I was making for bands translated to their brand or products.

Rumpus: Can you describe one of those campaigns?

Duval: A few years ago a book publisher called Gestalten approached my wife [illustrator Jen Skelley] and me about being in a book they were putting together on design. The book came out, and a year later a New York ad agency called Mother contacted us. The creative director had the book and invited some of the illustrators to pitch them campaign ideas for Sweet ‘N Low. We thought, Hey, this probably won’t pan out but let’s try it. We didn’t hear anything at first, but then maybe six months later they came back to us and offered us the job. It was exciting to do this big national campaign—I mean it was surreal. There were ads on top of taxis and a Jumbotron animation in Times Square, ads in every print magazine, and huge six-foot bus stop posters of these crazy, psychedelic, over-the-top illustrations.

Rumpus: Are there major differences for you between, let’s say, working for a commercial client on something like Sweet ‘N Low,and working on projects for an indie band?

Duval: Sweet ‘N’ Low was a rare breed. [The process] was very open, and I had as much control over that as a concert poster. Surprisingly, sometimes an album cover or a T-shirt can be more restrictive because you’re not just collaborating with the musician but also the label.

Rumpus: Are there often big-time disagreements, like in This is Spinal Tap?

Duval: Sometimes it’s a daunting path. Labels are signing fewer bands. They have to be careful about the budgets, and they end up trying to control everything including the creative. But sometimes my work on music stuff has led to other kinds of work, which doesn’t have those constraints. Someone at Sierra Nevada liked my designs for Phish, for example, and hired me. In fact, I’ve been doing a lot of beer labels recently. The craft beer industry has really exploded, and every month you hear of a new brewery opening. Sometimes this stuff is limited release or seasonal, and it often has artwork attached to it. The craft beer scene reminds me of the early concert poster scene, and there’s also a crossover demographic. Just as sometimes people are drawn to an album based on the cover art, people can become curious about a beer because of the label.

Rumpus: Do see yourself ever leaving the music world behind for a full-time ad career?

Duval: My business is a now a mix of contract and retail work for people in and beyond music. I’ll always design concert posters, but it’s very hard to make a living just doing that.

Rumpus: Is there any music right now that’s rocking your world? Something you listen to when you design?

Duval: Musically I find my interests shifting almost seasonally. This summer the sound I’ve been gravitating toward is the psychedelic America thing that’s happening, bands like Generationals and Houndmouth—cool, young stuff with folkie vibe—but I never listen when I design.

Rumpus: That’s interesting: I’ve always imagined that listening to music would help as an interpretative tool.

Duval: I always used to listen to the bands I was designing for to spark an idea, but I’ve found that if you try to get too focused on one part of, let’s say, a line or a song you might lose a bigger idea. Plus, everyone takes something different from what they hear or see.

Rumpus: Speaking of interpretation, I don’t want to overstep, but on the bio section of your website, you list among the “twenty-three things you enjoy” semi-hollow guitars, the color blue, and the number eight. Would you like to elaborate on any of these?

Duval: Let’s go with the last one. I have always liked the number eight. It rhymes with my name and was often my number in sports growing up. When someone else took it, I usually chose a number that somehow, to me, was still an eight. I went with twenty-three in high school because I saw it as two cubed. [Laughs.]

Rumpus: Is there anything else we should know about Nate Duval?

Duval: Another fun fact: I always keep as many two-dollar bills in my wallet as I come across. Right now there are five. I never spend them, just must be some sort of superstition thing I’ve had for like ten years.

***

This interview has been edited and condensed. If you’d like to recommend someone for “Sound & Vision,” drop Allyson a line here.

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]]>http://therumpus.net/2014/09/sound-vision-6-nate-duval/feed/0Whistling in the Darkhttp://therumpus.net/2014/08/whistling-in-the-dark/
http://therumpus.net/2014/08/whistling-in-the-dark/#commentsWed, 13 Aug 2014 22:00:32 +0000http://therumpus.net/?p=129657Every generation has its reservations about popular music—all the same, the last few market-driven decades have undoubtedly left their own, new, unique mark on its most contemporary manifestations. Still, there are radio programs out there dedicated to music as such.

This Thursday, our very own Allyson McCabe will be joining radio host Binnie Klein on WPKN 89.5FM in Bridgeport to “spin some favorite covers, rarities, outtakes, and demos, and of course, to tell stories.”

]]>Every generation has its reservations about popular music—all the same, the last few market-driven decades have undoubtedly left their own, new, unique mark on its most contemporary manifestations. Still, there are radio programs out there dedicated to music as such.

This Thursday, our very own Allyson McCabe will be joining radio host Binnie Klein on WPKN 89.5FM in Bridgeport to “spin some favorite covers, rarities, outtakes, and demos, and of course, to tell stories.”

]]>http://therumpus.net/2014/08/whistling-in-the-dark/feed/0Sound & Vision #3: Melissa Crosshttp://therumpus.net/2014/05/sound-vision-3-melissa-cross/
http://therumpus.net/2014/05/sound-vision-3-melissa-cross/#commentsFri, 23 May 2014 07:01:31 +0000http://therumpus.net/?p=126709Welcome back to Sound & Vision, the Rumpus profile series that spotlights the creative talents of those working behind the scenes in the music industry. Vocal coach extraordinaire Melissa Cross is widely known for her work with “extreme” metal musicians including the lead singers of Slayer, Megadeth, and Killswitch Engage, as well as non-metalists Maroon 5, Sarah Bareilles, and Kevin Bacon. Helping musicians to preserve their pipes is highly technical work, but as Cross explains, singing is also about achieving the right state of mind and being.

***

The Rumpus: Can you tell me a bit about your background? I understand that you’re a classically trained musician and actor?

Melissa Cross: Yes! When I was little, my grandmother had an organ, a Hammond B-3. I loved watching her play, and I wanted to play myself but my feet didn’t yet reach the foot pedals. Finally, when I was six, I got a piano and started playing. I say “finally” because I was already taking ballet lessons and writing my own plays. “Look at me!” was my middle name. I was the kind of kid who wanted to show people that I could do something.

I continued piano, ballet, and the theater, and my piano audition got me into the Interlochen Arts Academy. And then I started playing guitar when I was thirteen, and by the time I was fourteen, I also started writing my own songs. Back then I loved Janis Joplin and Joni Mitchell was my idol. I wanted to be them, but my dad was British and nothing I did was good enough because it wasn’t “properly” done. So after Interlochen I went to the Old Vic Theatre School in England, but I was still totally into my guitar and I busked in the streets, and when I finished Old Vic I left acting behind to be in a rock band.

Rumpus: Like Janis or Joni?

Cross: Well, at the time there was a big changeover—it was Elvis Costello and the Sex Pistols and I was a little out of sync because I played an acoustic guitar—so I moved from England to California, and I got an electric guitar and started to follow some of the punk bands. Within a year I moved from San Francisco to Los Angeles to be in a punk band called The Limit, entering as a guitar player and then taking over as lead vocalist, and I co-wrote songs with the keyboard player. We opened for X, The Go-Gos, The Circle Jerks, The Plugs, The Blasters, The Textones—

Listen to Cross and her band’s song “Teddy Bear” (iPad/iPhone users click here):

Rumpus: Sounds like you landed in the right place at the right time…

Cross: Well, almost. My aunt was on a plane with Simon Napier-Bell, The Yardbirds’ manager (who was at the time managing Wham! with George Michael), and he took our band’s 45 and redid it, and he changed the name, and he painted up my face, and he put colors in my hair, and gave me diamond earrings, and then I had a 12” single in the UK… But it was by Melisssa because he put three S’s in my name and credited the hair designer but didn’t include any musical credits…

Listen to the altered version of “Teddy Bear” (iPad/iPhone users click here):

Cross: Ultimately, years later in New York City, I became kind of the next big thing, meaning I had the top lawyer, the top manager, and three labels that were bidding to sign me. But I also had a drug problem—a bad one.

And I remember the night: it was November 9, 1984. It was in a club called Tracks. The New York Times was there. They were doing a piece—“the day in the life of an A & R person.” There were three labels there all waiting to see me do this performance. I was really bad. I decided to detox and stop using two days before this showcase. I had no voice. I looked like hell. I hadn’t eaten. And a week later in TheNew York Times, there was a quote: “Had she mercifully paused for breath or had she finished,” and the quote said, “Yup. She’s finished alright.” It was such a disaster but I did get sober. I got clean.

Rumpus: Did you try to get right back in the game?

Cross: Years went by, but I didn’t give up. I continued in my day jobs, going to AA meetings, and writing songs that were somewhat confessional. I think the journey past that point was one where I had a lot of integrity but I didn’t have that Souxsie and the Banshees kind of mystique anymore. I was much more forthcoming and honest. I did acoustic guitar stuff and then I’d get fed up with it and rock out again, and I went back and forth, always showing up at the label and being the bridesmaid. I got so close so many times, but I think it was really the shame. I felt so bad about blowing it, smashing my dream on one night.

Rumpus: How did you come through those experiences to teaching?

Cross: I was a legal secretary. I was an executive assistant. But I couldn’t spend eight hours a day in an office. It just wasn’t me. And there came a point where I didn’t want to live anymore, so I reached a kind of spiritual understanding. I decided I was going to love every moment of my life and that meant I was going to sing no matter what—I bought a little battery-powered amp and I auditioned for “Music Under New York” and I got it, which meant I was going to sing in the subway.

I sang in Grand Central. I sang in Penn Station. And while I was doing that, someone stopped me and asked if I could teach them to sing. And I realized I’d been studying voice at that point for like fifteen years, and that I could do that, and I loved teaching. And the girl I gave the lessons to said to me, “You’re really good at this! You should do this for a living!” Then I had five students, and then I had ten, then twenty. I put an ad in The Village Voice and then I had forty students and carpel tunnel. So that’s how I got to teach—by making the choice to do what I loved. And I’m really glad I did that because it was waiting for me. Everything unfolds as it’s supposed to if you’re awake and flexible. I wasn’t flexible for a long time. They told me I wasn’t going to be a rock star and I was like, “Fuck you!”

Rumpus: Were you able to draw on your experiences as a performer to teach others how to sing?

Cross: I think it’s very important for a teacher to have experience as a performer. It’s very hard to teach this without really knowing what goes on there. It isn’t just technical. I know what the brain does, how the “committee” inside speaks to you, like: oh, you’re an impostor, you’re so bad, they’re telling you that you’re fooling yourself and you’re a piece of you-know-what and you suck. I know that feeling and how to replace that with a different energy. And if I hadn’t been there I don’t know I would know what it takes to move through that.

Watch Cross working with one of her students:

Rumpus: Is it more difficult to teach screaming compared to vocal styles?

Cross: Before I got involved with screaming I was teaching commercial genres of vocal technique for at least eight years—the technique is the same no matter the genre. The person on Broadway does the same warm-up as the heavy metal guy. Your voice is a sponge. You could wash a car with it or polish silver. But with screaming there are some advanced applications and contexts.

In all healthy voice production, there must be coordination, a balance between air in the lungs and the closure of the vocal folds. The human voice has some “registration issues” that keep voice teachers in business. To simplify, there are certain laryngeal positions that won’t accommodate higher or lower notes. Accessing that coordination feels like trying to learn to drive a car with a clutch, and teaching that requires some imagination. When you start thinking about body parts the singer will focus on their body, and then they’ll start holding their breath, and when that happens there’s no air going through their vocal folds. So you have to start talking instead about non-body/voice-related movement, something dynamic like painting a big blue stripe across a canvas…

Rumpus: Is screaming very different from what you had been doing back in your old punk days?

Cross: Back in the ‘70s and ‘80s when I was in a punk band, I thought I was screaming, but it was nothing like screaming today. It still had a musical note or spoken word in it. But in screaming there is just a distortion, a sound with no voice in it—just distortion, a chaotic vibration. For example, an A note is 440 cycles per second, meaning my vocal folds are vibrating 440 cycles per second, like a string. When that distorted sound happens, the vibrations are irregular, sometimes for an entire song. When there is a note with it, that’s what Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, and Tom Waits do. It’s furry, and when there’s like fur on it, I call that “heat.” But when it doesn’t have any note or spoken word in it, I call that “fire.”

Watch Cross explain more about the differences between “heat” and “fire,” and demonstrate a vocal exercise she calls “the rainbow”:

Rumpus: You’ve made two instructional DVDs, and to date they’ve sold over 50,000 copies. How great is the need for “extreme” vocal training?

Cross: Starting in the early ‘80s, there were some thrash metal bands like Metallica, Pantera, Slayer, and Megadeth, and then more bands like that started popping up, and then there was a need. These kinds of bands aren’t often on the radio but they’ve been strong for years, and unlike many people who are on the radio, these guys are making a living at it. Their fans are dedicated. It survives because it is a commitment of point of view. The fans buy every CD, all the merch, and they do that progressively through the band’s career.

When the guys in these bands went to voice teachers and said, “This is what I do and I’m hurting myself,” the teachers were telling them you just can’t do that anymore. An old friend of mine from Interlochen was recording a lot of these bands and he asked me to help get them through their recording sessions. My mouth was hanging open when I heard this music for the first time, but I used my acting skills to mimic it and figure out how to do without hurting myself, ultimately sticking a camera down my throat at my ENT’s office, watching my larynx on a screen so that I could see what it does when I did it wrong and right. Those first people I worked with became famous. It’s a closely-knit community so it wasn’t long before word got out that there was this “PTA mom” in Midtown and they all came. And soon they all came in droves and that led to the first instructional DVD.

Rumpus: You call your technique the “Zen of Screaming,” which refers to a state of mind and being. How do you help vocalists—not just “extreme” vocalists, but all kinds of singers—to find and hone their true voices?

Cross: Every student has their heroes and we want to imitate them, but at some point you have to find your own voice. When you’re up there and you’re channeling your hero, there are these moments in time when you mimic and you’re trying to choreograph yourself, and you’re not being inside of yourself. You’re being a spectator, driving from the passenger seat. You can’t sing well that way because it physiologically affects your voice. You have to stop listening and replace the listening with being in the moment with your sound, which is as trippy as painting a vowel.

What I teach is being the vowel. I wouldn’t tell you where to put your tongue, your jaw. If I asked you to sing an A, I’d tell you to put one hand here, like on the side of a teepee and the other hand on the other side of the teepee and ask you to be an A. And you can’t listen to it because you’re being an A. The sound, the experience of the resonance, the buzz you feel in your face, it’s all coming from you. It makes your larynx not reach up without you “thinking” that. You should not sound like anyone else. You should sound like yourself. Let it unfold the way it is supposed to. If you love music, music will bring you love.

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]]>http://therumpus.net/2014/05/sound-vision-3-melissa-cross/feed/1Sound & Vision #2: Tony Mangurianhttp://therumpus.net/2014/04/sound-vision-2-tony-mangurian/
http://therumpus.net/2014/04/sound-vision-2-tony-mangurian/#commentsFri, 25 Apr 2014 07:01:18 +0000http://therumpus.net/?p=125605Welcome back to “Sound & Vision,” the new Rumpus profile series that spotlights the creative talents of those working behind the scenes in the music industry. In this installment, I’ll be talking with Tony Mangurian, an uncommonly gifted and versatile engineer, producer, composer, and musician. Mangurian’s richly textured beats, samples, and loops perfectly captured New York City’s rap-rock vibe in the ‘90s. His early work with Luscious Jackson led to a longstanding creative partnership with the legendary producer Daniel Lanois that’s brought his talents to Bob Dylan, U2, Willie Nelson, and Neil Young. Mangurian has also worked with emerging artists like the alt-folk musician Devendra Banhart and the dance pop crooner Sextooth, and he has a foot in the advertising world—among his most famous commercial jingles is “Easy, Breezy Beautiful Cover Girl.”

We recently met at Mangurian’s Soho studio to talk about how he got his start and how his musical career has evolved. Although Mangurian has long been considered the go-to guy for beats and samples, he has a subtly nuanced view of technology and the critical differences between making and performing music. I’m especially excited that our interview is enhanced with videos and audio clips, including drumming and loop demos that show how Mangurian does his work.

***

The Rumpus: How did you first get into music?

Tony Mangurian: As a kid, there was always music in my house, and I remember when I was about seven or eight years old my parents took me to see the Rolling Stones’ movie Gimme Shelter. There was something about seeing that film—I just knew that I wanted to be a drummer. I took some lessons at the Third Street Music School, but learning traditional music on a practice pad was not what I wanted. I wanted to be in a rock band, so I gave music school up after like six months and got into comic books. But then, a few years later, I went to junior high at I.S. 70, which had a great arts program. In your first year you would do music, acting, musical theater, and art, and then you would stay for another two or three years and focus on one of those things.

Rumpus: Did you know right away that you would focus on music at I.S. 70?

Mangurian: Pretty soon… The school had a really cool jazz band and they would give great concerts and tour around, so when it came time to do the auditions there was a huge crowd of kids in the music room. We were all lined up at this doorway where a lady had all these mouthpieces. When it was your turn to audition, you could tell her what you wanted to play and she’d give you a mouthpiece and let you try it. The coolest guy in the jazz band was the sax player, so of course when it was my turn I asked for a sax mouthpiece, but it wasn’t easy to make the right sound without knowing what I was doing. So she handed me a trumpet mouthpiece and I ended up playing trumpet. But then summer vacation came around, and when I came back to school that fall there were suddenly like forty trumpet players and the guy who was running the jazz band need drummers. He asked if there was anyone who wanted to play and I lit up.

Rumpus: How long did it take to revive your old dream of becoming the next Charlie Watts?

Mangurian: Not long at all! I stuck with drumming, and after junior high I got into Music and Art [the prestigious NYC performing arts high school that inspired the movie Fame]. I studied classical music there while I was playing in rock bands, and I got into New England Conservatory on scholarship. It was the Julliard of Boston, but I knew as soon as I got to the Conservatory that I did not want to study music anymore. I just wanted to play in a band, so I went right back to New York.

Mangurian: I was working days at an art gallery in Soho, where I was [Jean-Michel] Basquiat’s assistant. But I also had a studio at 8th Avenue and 38th Street, and when I wasn’t working, my rock bands used to jam up there. We had 4-tracks, and that’s where I learned how to record stuff. It was so much fun!

Rumpus: How did that lead to working with sampling and loops?

Mangurian: I was still into rock but I also got into other kinds of music, like club and dance music, and I was also doing some experimental stuff with an old friend of mine from high school, working with odd time signatures, polyrhythmical pieces with xylophones and drum machines. This was in the early ‘80s and that kind of stuff was happening, and we’d just keep recording and bouncing stuff. I also kept on writing music, and playing drums, and then I started teaching myself to play guitar and keyboards. Eventually I wanted to start working with other artists and producing their music.

One day I ran into Gabby Glaser, who used to hang out with a friend of mine, and she said, “I have these three girls I play with, and we call ourselves Venus Flytrap.” They all came over to my studio, and it was Gabby and Jill Cunniff and two other girls who were sisters. We were playing with a few of their songs for about six months or so, but they broke up, and then Jill and Gabby came back to me as Luscious Jackson and we started recording some demos that eventually became the band’s debut EP, In Search of Manny.

Rumpus: What was the recording technology like back then?

Mangurian: We had an old analog 8-track and we would sync it to a sequencer that would trigger the samples, so we’d have drum loops playing through the Atari computer, and back then our sampler had like nine seconds of sampling time. Back then the technology was so limited but you could still make music with it. Jill and Gabby would come in with cassettes of stuff they had recorded in the streets, like weird people saying stuff or random instruments, and we also used records that we would sample from, and they would sing over all of that.

Rumpus: As you started producing other artists, did you keep working on your own music?

Mangurian: I was always trying to write an R&B hit that would be on the radio and I got my first record deal with this guy Mark Kamins, who was the DJ who discovered Madonna. With a singer, I wrote a song called “Girl, You Should Have Told Me,” but it didn’t go anywhere. I also started doing ad work scoring commercials and that did go somewhere.

Like I said before, the technology back then was ridiculous. You had to have a VCR with a time code on it to trigger the computer, and if you wanted to record live instruments, you’d have to have a tape machine that was triggering off of that. I taught myself how to do it, and I remember I took extra care to put my audition tape in stereo so it would sound really great, but when I had my first presentation meeting at the ad agency the guy’s machine was only playing half the sound! Still, it went well and I ended up working on Cover Girl, Pantene, and a bunch of other stuff.

Rumpus: Is doing commercial work a lot different than working with musicians?

Mangurian: When I’m doing commercials, I’m writing and producing. With musicians, they usually have their own demos or concepts, and I work with that, although sometimes I also co-write, and I like to play a lot on the stuff I work on.

Rumpus: Are the musicians who work with you looking for a particular “signature sound”?

Mangurian: Not really. Usually I let the artist lead and I always think of a producer as being like a director who keeps the show rolling by helping the musicians stay focused, introducing them to potential collaborators, and throwing different ideas at them. So like one day Dan Lanois left me a phone message saying, “Hey, there’s a band I’m working with in France. Are you free for a week to engineer some demos? It will be really easy, just drum machines and acoustic guitars.” I called him back and it’s U2! And then I get over there and it’s not that simple. It’s the whole band and Brian Eno and real drums. Sometimes the band would have these twenty-minute jams and I would just edit it down into a four-minute song. Other times, Dan and I would sometimes go in before their session and come up with drum beats and samples and we would create these beds of music and then they would come in and hear it and play over it.

Those sessions became a few of the songs on the record, including “Cedars of Lebanon.” For that one, I’d taken a Harold Budd sample and made a loop out of the keyboards and Brian Eno gave me a drum beat, and then it changed a million times until eventually it became that song.

Rumpus: Wow. The scene has certainly changed a lot since the days of 8-tracks and Ataris. Back then a lot of the conversation seemed to be about whether sampling and using loops and stuff really counted as “making” music. Today that debate seems moot to me. I’m wondering: as an engineer and producer, what’s your take on this?

Mangurian: In the old days you had a mixing board and a bunch of faders and EQs, which are the treble and bass on each sound, and all these effects, like echo and reverb. You’d spend all night mixing a song and then you would think, Oh god, I hope we’ve got it. And then if you had something else to do the next day you’d have to change your mixing board, and then you’d get a phone call two days later: “Oh, I don’t really like that mix. The vocal’s not loud enough.” Or: “You know, I think it’s too loud.” Then you’d have to go back in and recreate the entire mix, so you’d start making charts of your whole mixing board before you walked away.

Now that everything is inside of your computer, you don’t have to worry about any of that because your old session is always there. Well, that’s really nice, but you can keep working on it forever and you don’t have to be as thoughtful about the choices you make. I don’t want to sound like a curmudgeon, but today there’s too much reliance on technology and not enough emphasis on craft.

Rumpus: Do you think that’s also true for artists? When I think back to the ‘90s, people like Luscious Jackson, The Beastie Boys, and Beck were drawing from all different genres and influences to create idiosyncratic, sometimes kaleidoscopic sounds. Why hasn’t technology fostered more of that kind of sonic experimentation among musicians?

Mangurian: I think that was a more creative period when the focus was still on originality and individual expression, not just on using technology to make something sound artificially flawless. Look, technology is really cool and drum machines are great but honestly, I don’t think it’s better than a real drummer, and it can take some of the personality out of it. If you listen to the iTunes Top 10 today it sounds like the same drummer on every song. In terms of time keeping the feel is always “correct.” The technology has allowed non-musicians to make music, but I think there is a difference between making music and playing music.

Hear Mangurian show how drum loops are made, and discuss the creative pros and cons of sampling (iPhone/iPad users click here):

Rumpus: So even though it’s easier to “make” music, we’ve lost something essential in the mix?

Mangurian: Well, yes. I’m thinking about a conversation I had once with Jim Keltner, a super-famous studio drummer who’s played with John Lennon and a million other guys. He worked on Time Out of Mind, the Bob Dylan record I also worked on, and then a couple of years later we worked on another record together, and we were all playing as a live band with the singer for the takes, which just doesn’t happen anymore. Jim said to me, “Usually I go in to do a session and I’m just there with the engineer and a bunch of the music has already been recorded and I just do my drum bits and they edit it together, and that’s the end of it. Back when I was in a studio band situation, when you needed real musicians to create the music, all the guys would be in the room together and then the red light would go on for ‘record’ and you would have rehearsed the song a bunch of times but you’d still be scared because you didn’t want to screw up in front of the other guys.” You know, Jim had a good point. When you’re performing there’s a different energy than knowing you can just “fix it.”

Rumpus: Tell me more about that.

Mangurian: You can also make music in a computer that sounds great, but actually sitting down and playing with a bunch of people is a different experience. When you’re buried in the sequencers and computers you can come up with tons of stuff, and it’s incredible what you’re able to do. The part that’s probably missing from that is it’s really fun to play with other musicians—the actual experience of making music with other people, being in the room with them, hanging out with them, joking with them, and feeding off their musical feel, which will be different than yours, but when you put it together you come up with something that isn’t just you. A lot of times, when people play and record all the instruments themselves, it sounds sterile because they have the same feel. I think people who can really play, and especially those who play with other musicians, can put a lot more emotion into it.

Hear Mangurian talking about what it was like to play and record live with Willie Nelson and his band (iPad/iPhone users click here):

***

This interview has been edited and condensed. If you’d like to recommend someone for “Sound & Vision,” drop Allyson a line here.

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]]>http://therumpus.net/2014/04/sound-vision-2-tony-mangurian/feed/1Sound & Vision #1: April Bartonhttp://therumpus.net/2014/03/sound-vision-1-april-barton/
http://therumpus.net/2014/03/sound-vision-1-april-barton/#commentsFri, 14 Mar 2014 07:01:20 +0000http://therumpus.net/?p=124231They say it’s a long way to the top if you wanna rock ‘n’ roll. In my case, the path led me from basement bands, to a gig as a writing professor, and then to public radio, where I’ve produced stories about music, from pre-teens rocking in the suburbs to the best Led Zeppelin tribute band this side of Kashmir.

I’m now pleased to present “Sound & Vision,” a new Rumpus profile series that spotlights the creative talents of those working behind the scenes in the music industry. Some are unsung. Others are rock stars in their own right. But in every case, what’s drawn me to their stories is how these folks have come to their work, and the unique wisdom and insight they’ve drawn from their experience.

First up is April Barton. Barton has styled covers for Rolling Stone and GQ, and appeared on Bravo’s Shear Genius and TLC’s 10 Years Younger. She’s the mastermind behind Willie Nelson’s famous braids, and her client roster is a who’s who of music’s biggest legends, including Bono, Elvis Costello, Mary J. Blige, and Bonnie Raitt.

Barton has come a long way from the small town in South Florida where she got her start at fifteen, styling her high school classmates. By eighteen, she was ready to break out, landing in London’s punk scene, and then on to New York where she quickly made a name for herself at the city’s top salons. Despite her early success, Barton felt creatively hemmed in, and after much soul-searching she decided to chuck it all and start over again. And that’s where true kismet came into play.

Upon returning from a six-week spiritual retreat, Barton was invited to a cocktail party thrown at the Chelsea Hotel by resident artist George Chemeche. He enchanted her with tales of the Chelsea’s storied history, and when Barton shared her vision of building a hair salon where musicians and artists could nurture each other’s creative spirits, Chemeche introduced her to the Chelsea’s managers and part-owners, Stanley and David Bard.

As soon as Barton saw Suite 303, which was, at the time, a simple corner hotel room, she knew she’d found the right home. She thrived in the space for eighteen years, styling musicians and scores of artists including Rene Ricard, Lola Schnabel, Leo Villareal, and Matthew Ritchie, who often bartered their time for time, and their art for art.

This past September, Barton relocated Suite 303 to its new location in Noho. When we recently met there, she reflected on where she’s been and where she wants to go next.

***

The Rumpus: You’ve styled some of the industry’s biggest stars. Who were some of your early style icons?

April Barton: Madonna was huge for me. When I was a freshman or sophomore in high school and Lucky Star came out and I saw this girl in fishnet stockings and bleached blonde hair and roots and bows, I just had so much identification with her rebellion. In South Florida, nobody wore wool to-the-floor trench coats. The snowbirds had sold or pawned them off to thrift stores and I would go and buy them and I would have teddies on underneath. And teachers used to send me to the office saying, you know, “she won’t take off her jacket,” and then I was like, Okay, I’m going to call their bluff. Next time they tell me to take off my jacket. And I’d have a teddy on and I’d get expelled for indecent exposure!

Rumpus: Tell me a little more about your high school. Is that where you first got involved with styling?

Barton: I’d been on the run with my father, who was a gambler, and we had lived a very fast-paced lifestyle. And at fifteen I needed to settle down a little, so I rekindled with my mother, and I thought, Let me try to go out there and graduate high school with some stability. The high school was conventional. I mean it was out west, in Davie, Florida. And I would take kids home from school—like cheerleaders—I would befriend one or two of them and I noticed that all of them had really long hair, so I would take one home and chop off her hair and realize what a stir it created. The mother would call my house, and talk to my mom: “Your kid cut my daughter’s hair off!”

I started learning the power of it early on—the power of image—of how you can set yourself apart. I started producing photo shoots and working in a cosmetic shop, and I would take people to thrift stores and dress them in fishnets… I started a portfolio, I took pictures of the girls, I did their makeup, I did their hair, I dressed them, and I had a very successful business by like sixteen years old and it just never stopped.

Rumpus: When and how did you break out of Florida?

Barton: I started working for Vito the barber—I became the assistant—and then I met this guy Richard Crowl, who had a salon called Twisted Scissors. He was super-talented, and he just opened up my world. And then at eighteen, I left Florida and went to open a school of hairdressing in England with these British dudes that I met. They had come into Miami to do these huge hair shows, and they would charge like $600 for a weekend seminar. And I was in beauty school at the time getting my license, and I met them in the parking lot and I was like, “I bet you didn’t take an assistant. I’m the best assistant there is!” I would walk in with them and grab their bags, and they ended up sending me a ticket to open up their school of hairdressing in London at the height of the punk scene in the late ‘80s, and that’s where I really became unleashed. For me, it was more the aesthetic and environment than the music. Like what we do here, in the States, you know the FDA and the regulations, and you know Caucasian dreads and hair falling off in the sink… Here you get sued; in London, it’s celebrated. Oh well, try it again! So it was this freedom of expression that was such a turn-on.

Rumpus: What brought you to New York?

Barton: I’d gone back to Florida but I knew it wasn’t going to work, and so I bought a one-way ticket. For me to come to New York City at nineteen, I had already been doing hair for like four or five years. I cornered people… like John Dellaria. They had a two-year assisting program. I was like, “You haven’t seen me cut hair.” They go, “Doesn’t matter. You don’t have any clientele. You go through the ropes just like everybody else.” So I was like, “Okay, on my days off, can I bring in clients?” And I would literally pay people to get their hair cut by me. I would cocktail at night and make $200-$300 and go out on West Broadway and buy like six or seven haircuts!

Rumpus: How did you choose people?

Barton: Whatever inspired me. I would just see people walk by and I would look at her and go, God! That would be amazing if I cut it to her collarbone! She looks like a giraffe! I could totally pop her cheekbones! Or I would look at somebody else and be like, I could totally do bed head style! I could rough it up! He looks like he’s probably a cool musician! He doesn’t want to get his hair cut because he’s scared that he’s going to get this stupid haircut on his head, but I can get in there and do what he would do if only he knew how! I would have these conversations with myself. The hair talks to me.

Rumpus: And at what point did you decide to go out on your own?

Barton: Working for John Dellaria was stimulating. I still picture him to be a major influence in my development. He’s like a “hair father” to me. He taught me techniques. He celebrated my cutting. He encouraged my talent and my hands, so it really exploded.

I got booked solid on West Broadway in the ‘90s. But by the time people are asking for a certain cut, I’m usually over it. I’m onto the next. And John Dellaria was that type of a place. You get a lot of trendy people coming in and wanting something, and it started to kill me inside because I was like, This isn’t what I want to do. A good way of explaining the art of what I do—usually it’s an organic feeling about hair. Like, before the faux hawk came in, I was sort of thinking about Roman hats and the punk scene in the ‘80s, and by the time it’s mainstream, I’ve already been doing it for a year and I want to change my pace.

Rumpus: So I understand you left and started working with a lot of runway models, but you also felt pigeonholed in that environment—to such an extent that you seriously considered leaving the profession. What brought you back?

Barton: I went away on a spiritual retreat, sort of like Eat, Pray, Love. I took off and went to Indonesia and Australia and traveled on my own for six weeks. I ended up picking up scissors in Indonesia with little kids at bodegas, and not even knowing the language, and expressing myself like I did when I was fifteen. And the training and the technique and all the things I thought I wanted were really stripped away and there was nothing but a little cute smiling face and a pair of scissors and it went back to the essence of that power and the unique pull that it had. When I came back, the phone started ringing—“April where are you? I need a cut!”

Rumpus: And how did that lead you to Suite 303?

Barton: [In 1995] I ended up going to this cocktail party at the Chelsea Hotel at George Chemeche’s—he’s an amazing artist who’s been living at the Chelsea for like fifty years, and he turned me on to the culture of the hotel and about how it originated. And it was very decadent—unlike it’s been more recently. You know, they named all of Chelsea after the Chelsea Hotel and it had this amazing lush history. He got my story and he said, “So what are you going to do?” And I said, “I don’t know.” And he said, “I think you should meet the owners of the Chelsea, Stanley and David Bard.” And I said, “Oh my god, that sounds incredible!” because I didn’t want to open a ground-level salon—like what—April’s Cuttery? Then David showed me Suite 303.

Rumpus: Can you describe the space when you first saw it?

Barton: It had a twisted light fixture hanging in the middle room. It was dark. It had stucco walls and wobbly wooden floors and a dingy single bed pushed in the living room, a long hallway with a kitchen in it, and a back bedroom. And I walked in, and he was talking, and I asked, “Can I ask you not to say anything? I just want to feel the space.” And when I walked down that corridor I heard people laughing and I saw a lot of people there and I went out on the balcony, and I stood there and I smiled. And I looked back at him and said, “It’s mine. I’ll take it.” I had no idea what I was signing on to, didn’t know what the rent was going to be, never had a rent that high, didn’t have the money, didn’t know how I was going to pay it. But I signed the lease, moved in, and that was the beginning of a long, eighteen-year journey.

Rumpus: Do you remember the first cut you gave there?

Barton: The minute I stepped foot in there, my phone rang, and it was a girl saying, “I’ll go anywhere to have you cut my hair. Where are you now?” I pushed the bed over to the French door where the light was, I had her sit on the end of the bed, and I cut her hair. She gave me like eighty bucks or something, and I went to the corner store to buy cans of paint and painted the place a pale yellow, and my phone never stopped ringing. It blew up so quickly, everything I was looking for…musicians, models, actors… It was when I gave it all up and said, I’m just going to live my life here to the best of my ability and it feels right in this space and I can breathe here, that I could open the French door overlooking 23rd Street and go, Life is going to happen here! And it did.

Rumpus: A few months ago you decided to relocate the salon…

Barton: Yes. The Chelsea Hotel and all the stories that go along with it were magical, but in the last two or three years the management changed and the owners decided to sell. I’d been sitting on the fence for a long time. So much of my identity was invested in the Chelsea Hotel because it gave me room to grow as an artist and cultivated who I am in the industry—you know, like “rock-and-roll hairstylist to the stars”—and it was organic and authentic, it was sort of something that came and gelled. I will be forever grateful for the time I spent at the Chelsea but it was time to say goodbye.

I sent out a mass e-mail to all of my people, 3,000 people in the city, asking, Where do you see us? This woman, Selima [designer-optician Selima Salaun of Selima Optique], kept coming up, and the way people were speaking of her was the way I would want people to speak of me. When I heard she had a place on 7 Bond Street, my heart lit up, because there is no other place in the city where I could see Suite 303 at the Chelsea Hotel survive. I met Selima and I got chills—the cobblestone streets, the bohemian chic, the feeling of the Chelsea, I was like, Oh my god! I think it’s here! And sure enough it was.

Rumpus: What’s next for April Barton?

Barton: My goal now is to reinvent. Just when you think you know it all, and you’re on a thing, jack it. You know, I’m feeling now the new days of hair. I’m feeling like I want to make a statement. I want hair that speaks to you in the streets.

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Hear Barton talk about how she got her start by clicking on the play button below. iPad/iPhone users click here.

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This interview has been edited and condensed. If you’d like to recommend someone for “Sound & Vision,” drop Allyson a line here.

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Featured image, image of Willie Nelson with April Barton, and image of Bono with April Barton all courtesy of April Barton.

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]]>http://therumpus.net/2014/03/sound-vision-1-april-barton/feed/0ALBUM #1, Audio Portraits of Artists and Writers at Work: Stephanie Tamezhttp://therumpus.net/2013/02/album-1-stephanie-tamez/
http://therumpus.net/2013/02/album-1-stephanie-tamez/#commentsTue, 05 Feb 2013 22:15:27 +0000http://therumpus.net/?p=110644Audio Portraits of Artists and Writers at Work]]>I came to The Rumpus with a proposal to produce a series of audio portraits of folks who are engaged in creative work. My plan was this: no sterile recording studios, no superficial interview questions, and no post-production gimmicks. Just an authentic conversation with an artist or writer about her creative process and the evolution of her work. The result is “ALBUM: Portraits of Artists and Writers at Work.”

First up is Stephanie Tamez, one of New York’s most sought after tattoo artists. Tamez’s eclectic style, which is rooted in Old World art, has attracted the attention of A-list clients from rock stars to novelists. Her incredible font and text work, which draws on her background in graphic design, has been featured in two books on typographical tattoos. We recently had a chance to meet at Saved Tattoo, the bustling shop Tamez co-owns with Scott Campbell, and in her private art studio, where she’s been painting and exploring new modes of self-expression.